Here's How Trump Made His Golf Empire Into A Billion-Dollar Tax Shelter

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0:57Hi, everybody. I'm Brittany Lewis, a breaking news reporter here at Forbes. Joining me once again is my colleague, Forbes senior editor, Dan Alexander. Dan, thanks so much for coming back on. Sure. Thank you, Brittany. The last time you and I spoke, we were talking about President Trump inside one of his golf courses, what it's like playing 18 holes with him, his penchant for his clubhouse hot dogs, and everything in between. Now we're talking about a different golf story related to President Trump. But here's your headline. Trump's golf empire is a billion dollar tax shelter. And it starts with this trip in 2025.

1:34Staff from an environmental nonprofit visited one of President Trump's golf clubs in Jupiter, Florida. So start off the conversation. Why does Forbes care about this three day trip? Because there's a lot of money at stake. So what Donald Trump has done is he's figured out that if he can donate the rights to develop his golf clubs into something else, and he can get appraisers to attach a really, really high number to what those rights are worth, then he can treat that as a charitable donation on his taxes and therefore take a huge tax write-off and still keep ownership of his golf courses, still run them as businesses, still make profits from them every year.

2:16but it makes a financial rationale that makes the whole thing make sense. Donald Trump's golf empire for a while has looked sort of like just a fancy trophy case. Some rich guys buy yachts, others buy golf courses. But this shows that there's a real financial motive behind this whole thing. And over the years, our estimates are that he has been able to shelter more than a billion dollars of income and saved$450 million on his taxes from doing this in five different properties. And there are plenty more that he can still do it on in the future. That is just an astronomical number, astronomical savings.

3:00But he discovered this strategy, as you reported, in the early 2000s. Bring us to that room, bring us to that meeting he had with someone named Ed Russo? Well, it starts in a meeting inside Trump Tower in Trump's apartment, not in his office. And Ed Russo comes in and Ed Russo is this environmental guy who's from the township of Bedminster, New Jersey, which is where Donald Trump has bought this old mansion that he wants to turn into a golf course. And Ed Russo is there to basically explain to him all of the complications with doing that, all the obstacles he's going to have to clear. And Donald Trump does not like this at all.

3:42And the line that he said, and this isn't quite word for word, but was something roughly like, I'm worth$6 billion. And if you think that a town like Bedford is going to push me around, you know, you're out of your mind. And Russo's response is, first of all, it's Bedminster. And secondly, the person with the most, the most powerful person in the room is the one with nothing to lose. and that's me. And then he walks out. But Donald Trump for a long time has realized that if he can take somebody who was once an adversary and turn them into an ally, it can be a huge asset for him. And that's what he does with Russo.

4:20He brings Russo in and says, you know what, I'm going to build this club. And if following your rules is the only way to do it, then you're going to help me build it. And so he does and they get the thing built. And then after it's built, Russo lets him in on this idea of you can actually get this huge tax benefit out of this as well. And does that strategy, does that change anything fundamentally about how the course is maintained, how the public could access it, anything for the members? Or does it just change specifically the fact that President Trump can write that off as a tax write-off? Life is all about making decisions.

5:01Sometimes you make questionable ones. Like buying a new TV that's too big for the wall because the electronics store employee was a little too good at their job. Then sometimes you make great ones, like protecting your home and auto with Progressive. You get customized coverage options so you can be sure you have the right coverage. Get your quote today at Progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company affiliates and other insurers. Not available in all states.

5:28Dan Alexander: This podcast is supported by Anthropic, the public benefit corporation behind Claude. Everyone's got a hard question about AI. Anthropic was built to surface those questions and share what it finds along the way, because there's hope in hard questions. Ask yours at Claude.ai slash Spotify and keep thinking. That's Claude.ai slash Spotify. The way that they design the course, because Russo was this environmental guy, you know, Trump brings him in and he sort of says, okay, well, if you're going to give me, you know, an open checkbook to develop this thing, I'm going to do it in ways that are a little bit more environmentally sensitive than you might expect.

6:15So they create like a little bird habitat inside the course. They allow for some equestrian trails to go through the course. All of this makes the place nicer, but it also makes it more possible for them to claim that there's a conservation purpose behind this course, which you need in order to get the tax benefit. Now, they make the claim and they tout all of the great things that this course is going to do for the public. And the IRS says, no, you think that this write-off is worth$39 million. We think it's worth zero. And at the time, there weren't a ton of conservation easements like there are today.

6:57And the IRS really wasn't fully staffed up on how to combat these things if they felt that people were being abusive in the numbers that they were claiming or in just the fact that there was a conservation purpose. In this case, the IRS pressed Donald Trump on both of those points. Number one, they didn't think that the conservation purpose was justified. Number two, they thought that the valuation was overstated. And they end up fighting about this for years. And ultimately, it looks like they come to a settlement and a settlement that the Trump organization walks away with thinking, wow, what a great deal.

7:34Let's do this again and again and again. I was going to bring that part up next in this conversation. historically, how does the IRS feel about a rich guy saying, hey, my golf course qualifies as a nature preserve. I want to write off X, Y, and Z. Initially, the IRS is saying, whoa, slow your roll here. That is not how much that's worth. That actually is worth zero. Now, how has the IRS changed their tune, if at all, over the course of the last 20 years? Well, there have been a couple of key court cases that have basically opened up the possibility that although conservation easements were not intended to be gifts for golf course developers, that you can claim them over golf courses.

8:22And so it can be legal to do it. The thing is that in all of these cases, whether or not it's legal comes down to the particulars of the deal itself. And one of the main factors is what's the size of the appraisal? How much are they claiming that this write-off is worth? And we know of at least two cases, the Bedminster one, and then another one at a state that he owns in Westchester County called Seven Springs, where the IRS did challenge it. Now, the more recent ones, there was one in 2022 and then another in 2025. They're recent enough that we don't quite know how the IRS has handled that. But we do know that historically, they were looking at it very carefully and not in the way that Trump would have liked.

9:08Now, of course, the story is different because Trump has a lot of power over the IRS. And so even if they did find an issue, there's questions of whether they would pursue that issue. Talk to us a little bit more about that, because if President Trump was not in the White House, do you think this would be a different story? And by how much? there's no question that it would be a different story we don't know exactly how the past irs matters how long they lasted uh so donald trump earlier this year in january of 2026 he sued the irs and the lawsuit was claiming that they had not protected his personal financial information during his first term and a few months later trump on one side of the table and trump on the other side of the table reach an agreement and the beneficiary is Trump.

9:59And the agreement is that the IRS is barred from looking into any past disputes between the IRS and the Trump organization. So if those disputes had carried on into that period, which were not positive if they had ended or not, then they were ended at that point. Now, the other thing that's important to understand here is that the way that the immunity agreement is worded is that it says that the IRS can't go after things that were disputes or disputes that could be pending. Now, this settlement was reached in May of 2026, and the filing deadline for taxes was April of 2026. So even if Donald Trump got a six-month extension until mid-October, which it looks like he did, then you could apply that could be pending language to the 2025 taxes.

10:54Now, Attorney General Blanche says that that's not the case. But if you look at the plain language of the document, it looks like there is room to argue that that's the case. And so we don't know for sure whether this applies in 2025 taxes, which is a big deal because he just took another massive conservation easement at the end of 2025. And whether that one is protected officially or whether it's only protected in the fact that the chain of command at the top of the IRS is loyal to Donald Trump, we're not quite sure. But what we do know is that through all sorts of different ways, Donald Trump appears to be setting himself up to protect himself from potential IRS challenges.

11:36The numbers that you found, they're so big that I think they bear repeating. So I'm going to read back some of your reporting to you. This is what you wrote. From 2005 to 2025, Trump donated at least five conservation easements, in all cases forfeiting development rights without surrendering ownership, including the Jupiter deal. Forbes estimates those gifts could shelter more than$1 billion of income, enough to save an estimated$450 million in taxes. The biggest beneficiary of this generosity, Donald Trump. Obviously, I know you're saying President Trump here is the biggest winner, but who are the winners and losers, if there are any?

12:12Well, the losers are almost everybody in America, because if Donald Trump were able to avoid taxes that he otherwise would not have been able to avoid, then that means that there's less money in the U.S. Treasury, and that means that there's less money to go around for the things that the government needs to spend money on. So obviously tax loopholes are a big problem for all US taxpayers. The beneficiaries are, of course, Donald Trump. And then you can also look at the people whose properties are right around these sort of preserved areas. So look, if you buy a house on a golf course and the golf course developer says, well, I could actually turn the golf course into 500 more houses.

12:56You don't want them to turn the golf course into 500 more houses. You want to be able to look out over a nice fairway while you're grilling out your hot dogs in the back of your house. So if they are forever banned from developing that into other houses, then you benefit from that. And in fact, there's there's the Trump organization has made this argument before city councils saying, you know, this is really good for the neighbors around the property. Now, one of the interesting details here is that of the Trump Jupiter course, which is the one that he put a conservation easement over in the end of 2025, one of the neighbors who lives on that course is Eric Trump, who is the president's son.

13:39And another neighbor who has a house on that course is Frank Bissignano, who was appointed in October of 2025, right when the Trump organization was putting together all this easement, to be the CEO of the Internal Revenue Service. Interesting neighbor to have and for you to point out, but I do want to zoom out just a little bit. You've been reporting on President Trump and his ability to profit off of his presidency now for years. President Trump today, according to Forbes, is worth$6.6 billion, and he's added billions to his fortune since he came back into office. He's been employing this tax strategy that we've been talking about now for years.

14:20But big picture here, what does this mean and what does this say about Trump 2.0? Well, he's been employing the strategy for a long time, but there's question of whether he's been getting away with the strategy for a long time because of those IRS challenges. And furthermore, whether he would continue to be able to adopt this same strategy in the future. What we see here is a very clear movement to leverage the presidency in a way that could be beneficial for the business. And Donald Trump, some of those audits and the IRS examinations were going on during his first term. He didn't sign an immunity deal during his first term while those were happening.

15:03And the second term he has. So I think that what you're seeing is a more comfort with blurring these boundaries, which at this point, I mean, so you can call it boundaries, is generous. But between the private business interests and the government interests, it's really become much, much more overt. Dan Alexander, I always appreciate your reporting, your conversations. People can read this story in full at Forbes.com. Thanks so much for joining me. Thank you.

16:03Then, sometimes you make great ones, like protecting your home and auto with Progressive. You get customized coverage options, so you can be sure you have the right coverage. Get your quote today at Progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company affiliates and other insurers. Not available in all states.